TFM1: Four Pillars Of Physical Preparation For Mountaineers

Hello hello guys my name is Rowan Smith and I want to welcome you to the training for the mountaineering podcast. Now this podcast is entirely dedicated to helping you train, prepare and conquer your upcoming mountaineering adventure. Once a week I'm going to be sharing with you in depth an evidence backed information around improving your physical performance on the mountain, reducing your likely good for pain and injury, nutrition for mountaineers and even a bit of mental strength development. So you can be empowered in your training to give yourself the very best chance of a safe, enjoyable and successful mountaineering adventure. So now that you know what you're in for, let's get into today's episode. Alright hello hello my name is Rowan Smith and I am your host for the Training for Mountaineering podcast. Now today we are talking all about the four pillars of successful physical preparation for mountaineering and the four pillars which I base my training off for mountaineers which I've seen some great success with. Now to be clear from the outset, this episode and this podcast is not going to be covering anything like gear, like planning or any particular technical stuff but we're going to be talking about the physical preparation and training side of things. So that's where these four pillars come into effect. Now for mountaineers who are already big into their training, who've done a lot of learning a lot of research around this, these pillars might be a bit of common sense and all the subjects I'm going to be talking about today, we're going to go into much deeper detail on these in future episodes of the podcast. But as this is a brand new podcast, I really do need to cover the basics and the foundations first, before we get to complicated, before we get to science, see before we get to technical. And this analogy should sound pretty familiar to you as a mountaineer because it's exactly what you need to be doing with your physical preparation. Get the basics and the foundations right first, before you go down the rabbit hole of all the other complicated and crazy types of training techniques. So enough about that, let's just get into these four pillars to start off with. Now pillar number one is something probably most people are going to be pretty familiar with and it's aerobic capacity. So more or less everyone knows about this and it's probably the single most important aspect of physical preparation, the mountaineering. Aerobic capacity is simply the ability of your body to utilize oxygen and fuse that as a fuel source when you're exercising and it's a single most important thing you need to develop to be successful on the mountain. Now there needs to be a major emphasis on this throughout your entire preparations. Now most people are pretty aware of this so I'm not really going to be hammering home the point too much and going into too much detail. But as a general principle, if you're trying to take shortcuts in your aerobic development and your aerobic work, you are leading yourself down a bad path. Meaning if you subscribe to the CrossFit or the Hit approach to develop yourself aerobically for the mountain meaning you're trying to go that high intensity route where you're really trying to condense your training time and try to really really just skip out on those longer duration sessions. You're really doing yourself a disservice and you're missing out. That stuff can work in the short term but as a long term approach it is incredibly ineffective. There is no getting around the fact that long duration, lower intensity training is essential in your preparations. And if you're skipping out on this or you're under emphasising this at any point during your training, you really are compromising your performance and your chance of success on the mountain. Now this is obviously a massive massive massive topic and we are literally describing the surface on that as a general principle today but further down the line in the podcast we're really going to be going into some depth around this particular subject on how you can best apply aerobic capacity development into your training, different methods and different techniques and a whole bunch of other stuff. So that's going to be expect that further down the line in the podcast. But for now that's a general principle. Pillar number one is aerobic capacity. Now Pillar number two for mountaineer's physical preparation is your strength training. Now strength training traditionally is just under utilised, under appreciated and really really misapplied in the mountaineering world. A lot of people have general ideas around why it is good for them and they know they need to be doing it but the fact that they don't put enough emphasis onto it and they don't apply it very well into their training and really not getting a huge amount of benefits or anywhere close to the potential benefits of strength training. And structured strength training 100% should be part of every single mountaineer's preparation. Now there can be no argument there that is so so so so beneficial or something I'm incredibly passionate about and no matter whether you're a brand new mountaineer or you're a lifelong outpannist, some type of strength training really really is crucial. Now this is for four big reasons really. Number one injury prevention, strength training is the single best thing you can do to prevent both overuse and acute injuries in your training and on the mountain. There's a huge body of evidence and body of science to back that statement up and I'm going to be exploring that a little bit further down the line in the podcast. Number two strength training helps improve your movement economy which basically means that every single step you take if you have developed a strength through strength training you're going to use less energy which basically increases your time to exhaustion. Meaning you can go for further for longer without getting as tired and without using as much energy and the value of that cannot be understated in the mountain new world. Number three it can improve your hiking and movement speed. Basically if you can improve your strength you can improve the speed that you can work out for longer periods of time. Meaning you can get from point A to point B quick out with less exhaustion and then number four it improves what's known as your strength reserve which is basically the difference between your maximal strength and the strength needed for a given task. Basically what that does is it makes every single step you take uphill quite a bit easier. Alternatively if you're climbing every single move that you do is going to be quite a bit easier. Meaning you're going to be using less energy meaning you're going to be working further away from your maximal output meaning you're going to be able to reserve, conserve your energies for when you need further down the line. Now strength training is something I'm incredibly passionate about. Strength training for mountain nearing is something there's so much information we can be talking about and we're going to be diamond a lot deeper into all of this in future podcasts. All those statements I just said I'm going to be sharing a bunch of science and a bunch of research around that to back that up. For now just take it on lip service but further down the line we are going to explore this quite a bit more. Now pillar number three something that's often overlooked by mountain nears in their physical preparation is mobility work. Now this is something that's really really really just not talked about very well and not applied very well in the mountain wing world but is very very very important. Now a little bit of anatomy lesson out to get your head around this and in general as a sort of general blanket statement your joints in your body want to be one of two things. They want to be mobile or they want to be stable. Now mobile means basically they don't want to be restricted they want to move relatively freely and be quite happy. Stable means there doesn't want to be a huge amount of movement through that joint. It basically wants us to stay more or less in the same position and just allow a few specific movements for it to stay safe and happy. Now if you break this up in the body it sort of alternates between joints that want to be mobile on joints that want to be stable. So the joints through the body which want to be mobile basically work out to be your big toe, your ankle, your hips, your thoracic spine which is your mid to upper back, your shoulders, your upper neck and also your wrists. Alternatively when you want to look at the joints which want to be stable and they work out to be your feet, your knee, your lumbar spine or your lower spine, your scapula, your lower neck and your elbow. They all want to be stable in a perfect world. Now a really common cause of dysfunction of pain and discomfort particularly for athletes who are putting so much load through their body on a constant occurrence is when one of these joints which want to be mobile will get restricted. So meaning if your ankle or your hips or your thoracic spine gets restricted that's an issue because what happens is when this happens the body needs to find movements somewhere else when you're trying to go through movements in your training when you're trying to go through movements on the mountain when you're trying to go movements in your everyday life it needs to find movements somewhere else. So what it will do is compensate by allowing more movement through the stable joints. So more movement through the knee or more movement through the scapula or something like that and that in general is not a great thing. So in very very general terms if a mountaineer has a particular joint which is restricted which naturally wants to move freely there's going to be a needs to be a significant amount of mobility work going into that area which is a point which I don't really see talked about much when it comes to the mountaineering world. Now this doesn't mean just doing random stretches or random foam rolling or just doing general mobility like yoga. I'm all for that type of stuff but I'm not talking about that here. Just like with any type of training you want to get targeted you want to get specific and really really aim for a particular outcome. So in this situation you need to identify if there are joints that need work and what particular joints need to be mobilized you want to use targeted mobilizations for that particular area and you want to be doing things that can have a measurable outcome. Meaning can you judge is it improving your mobility or does it just feel good. Now that is a very very important point to make and again we're going to be diving into this subject quite a bit more further down the podcast. And then pillar number four is recovery. Now you've probably all heard this statement before. You don't get theta stronger or more resilient when you train. You get theta stronger and more resilient. when you recover from training. Now most mountaineers I come across just give lip service to their recovery. They know it's important, but they just really, really do the minimum requirements. They might do a little bit of stretching and foam rolling here and there. They might do a low intensity cycle or run when they feel a bit beat up and a little bit tired, but in all honesty that really is it. Now as an endurance athlete, you need to be taking your recovery seriously. You need to treat it as equal importance to your other training, meaning if you're looking at a week and you're like, "I have to drop one session. What do I do?" It can't always be that recovery session. You need to be including it. Because if you're not recovering properly from day to day, from week to week, from month to month, you are not gonna be getting the full benefits of all the hard work that you're putting in and all that effort, all that heartache, all that time, put it into your training, you're not gonna be reaping every single scrap benefit you could potentially can if you're not recovering properly. On top of that, you're gonna be limiting your progress and you're gonna be increasing your risk of aches, pains, injury and illness. All of these, which can be a major spanner in the works when you're leading up to a big adventure or simply just getting the way of your day to day training if you're just trying to stay fit all year round for the mountains and it's just not something that we want. Now there are a million ways you can age your recovery, ranging from things like regular foam rolling stretch sessions to designate active recovery, to things like contrast bathing, to looking after your sleep. This is a really, really big rabbit hole and again, it's something we're gonna be exploring in quite a bit more detail further down the line in this podcast. But as a general whole, you need to treat recovery with the uttermost respect because it is so incredibly important. Now, those are the four pillars of physical preparation for mountaineering and you might have noticed that there are a number of things that I probably haven't covered today, which you're like, you know what, that probably should be part of my prep. So obviously we haven't talked about nutrition and in all honesty, that probably should be a fifth pillar when it comes down to things. That is a whole subject in itself. And yes, we are gonna explore that a lot further detail, further down the line. And I'm gonna bring in a number of dieticians to talk about particular nutrition practices, which can help with mountaineers preparations and their adventures because it's such an important subject. But we're gonna be exploring that further down the line. And then there's other things that you're probably thinking might be missing here, like the higher intensity training, the hypoxic training or outage training, mental strength strategies, breathing performance, and all these other little bits and pieces. And all of that stuff we will be talking about on this podcast moving forward, that stuff can be important, can be beneficial and depending on how you apply it and where you apply it. But the main emphasis here is they are not a pillar. Meaning they don't have to be prioritized in your training. You need to hit those four pillars to get the foundations and get the basics right. And then all those other things are probably gonna sit on the top. So they're the foundations that you built. And then the little, little last emphasis, things to round out your preparation, they're gonna be those little things. So we're gonna be diving them into the, diving into them deeper in the podcast. But they're definitely not essential as those four things I've mentioned there today. So just to recap again today, the four pillars you need to be covering, your robot capacity, your strength development, your mobility work, and your recovery. They're the four things you need to be emphasizing, week by week by week, month by month by month, even year by year by year, as a mountaineer, as someone who wants to be successful on their adventures and really, really perform at their best. So I really do hope you've enjoyed this podcast today, guys. Brand new podcast, brand new topic, brand new information coming at you. As I said, some of that stuff probably is very, very familiar to a lot of listeners, but we're gonna be diving a lot deeper in further episodes. If you have enjoyed this podcast and you have felt like you got a bit of value out of it, and even you might be excited about the upcoming episodes, I would absolutely love it, and it really would mean the world to me. If you could give this podcast a review on whatever podcast platform you're listening to. Now in the early stages of this podcast, getting reviews and getting ratings around this is a massive part of helping me grow this, and I really do think this is gonna be an amazing tool and resource for a Spire Mountain is moving forward. So I would love to be able to reach more people. So if you could take 30 seconds out of your day to leave a quick review on whatever podcast platform you're listening to, it would really mean the world to me. So I really do hope you've enjoyed this episode today guys, and we will catch you very soon for the next one coming up. Have a good one, bye.